Phenomena like sensation, perception, consciousness, attention and awareness are often confused with each other. E.g. are you aware or are you conscious that you are reading this? One of the main reasons for the confusion is that their processes are intermingled and one cannot understand them without knowing how they are related to each other. Following is the explanation of how they work.

To benefit from day-to-day interactions, VP needs to process multiple types of sensory data it receives, for which it needs to consider different types of sensations from multiple areas that are involved in it, which it cannot do simultaneously, as it is a serial processor. In other words, a person cannot attend to different types of sensations generated by different areas in the body simultaneously. What can be beneficial with such limitation is to continuously attend to the most significant of all sensations that are being received.

To know how that happens, we must first know how different senses are processed. Commonly known as Multisensory Integration, it is about how information from different senses is utilized and processed by the nervous system to form a perception. Common sense says that all senses must converge at some point in the brain, but no such location is found. Some suspect that all senses work on a time-sharing basis, and because it happens so quickly, it gives the illusion of simultaneity. Some also suspect quantum physics to be involved.